Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the two Hollywood stars in November 2020 bought the oldest football team in the world, the Welsh Wrexham in the English fifth league. What is County II for us, is the one-group National League for them. Now, just over two years later, the team is on the verge of its greatest success to date. He played a 3-3 draw at home in the 4th round of the FA Cup, forcing Sheffield United, who were promoted to the second division, to a replay. A fifth-class team doesn’t usually get this far. And where does it end?
Wrexham – Till I Die
Reynolds and McElhenney have nothing on earth to do with Wales, and for a long time they didn’t have anything to do with European football. Nor for those Americans who became Wrexham fans after the change of ownership and were able to fly thousands of kilometers to the game against Sheffield United. Of course, an American-Canadian owner couple would not justify this in itself, not only in the Premier League, but also in the fourth division.
The team started to feel really close after Disney+ started showing the Welcome to Wrexham documentary series entitled Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney follows the life of the team, similar to Till I Die, which elaborates the story of Sunderland. However, in Sunderland, we can peek into the behind-the-scenes secrets of the collapse.
As for Till I Die: McElhenney became interested in buying a British team after a Hollywood colleague showed him the series.
Rescuers from Hollywood
Reynolds, 46, was the star of Deadpool and has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. McElhenney is a producer and co-writer of the long-running It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And – you won’t believe it – he is also the producer of Welcome to Wrexham.
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Ryan Reynolds, one of the owners of Wrexham, pushes during the cup match against Sheffield United
Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP
But what does Wrexham FC grow on? Well, they are one of the few Welsh teams that play in the English league system. They have never played in the highest division, at the turn of the seventies and eighties and between 1994 and 2004 they were mostly in the second division, which is no small feat for a former mining town in North Wales with a population of sixty thousand. In any case, the city has so far fought its way into 444 with news such as they are homelesswho behave like zombies due to the effects of a cheap drug, a conservativeswho are now also successful in traditional working-class districts, or the manwho ate two plastic bags of Heinz ketchup, the sharp edge of which pierced his intestinal wall.
Professional football ceased to exist in the city in 2008, when the team dropped out of the English Football League’s four-division system into the semi-professional league, and has remained there ever since. The club has been managed by the fans for more than a decade, which also has its own romance, but after a while it becomes impossible to play for higher goals, to develop, to get promoted. Wrexham were almost relegated from the National League before Reynolds and McElhenney came on the scene.
They weren’t talking into thin air
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The Racecourse Ground, one of the oldest stadiums in the world, in a 2020 shot
Photo: PAUL ELLIS/AFP
Let’s see what the couple promised in November 2020 and how they are progressing on the way to realizing their plans.
- Promotion to the fourth line – in the year of the change of ownership, they became eighth, then second, in dramatic circumstances, losing in extra time against Grimsby Town. They now lead the league with a better goal difference (70-23 vs 70-25) ahead of Notts County, the founders of the Premier League in 1992, who played one game more.
- Increasing the number of spectators in the 10,000-seat stadium – the number of spectators of nearly 10,000 has already been reached, in addition to the locals, there are also many football tourists from America, Great Britain and Europe. Their number of spectators is such that they are already ahead of more than half of the seventy-two teams playing in a division higher than them. The Racecourse Ground is one of the oldest stadiums in the world, the Wales national team played its first home match here in 1877 (Scotland, 0-2, four thousand spectators).
- Chester will always be beaten – that was the most serious promise, but the easiest to fulfill. Chester lies just over half an hour from Wrexham, on the other side of the Welsh-English border. Theirs is an ancient rivalry, this is the cross-border derby, the cross-border rally, but due to the relegation of Chester, they have not been able to play against each other since March 2018. Their other big cross-border English rival is Shrewsbury Town, they currently play light-years away in League One, the third tier of English football, and have not seen each other since 2008.
I had that money
The Hollywood owners have signed a lot of new players, they want immediate results, i.e. promotion, they are not supporters of slow construction. They did not spare hundreds of thousands of pounds in the market to achieve their goals. Their most sensational signing was that of Paul Mullin, who moved up a division to top scorer and his team, Cambridge United, finished second in promotion. Still, Mullin chose the fifth line instead of the third. It was obviously the money. He has twenty goals in the league, seven in the FA Cup, and scored one against Sheffield United.
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The royal couple between Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, III. Károly and his wife Kamilla at the Racecourse Ground last December
Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP
Also from a team promoted from League Two to League One, Cheltenham Town, center back Ben Tozer stepped back two times, whose huge throw-ins resulted in a corner, for which even the defenders of Sheffield United were not prepared.
They have already beaten champions Arsenal once
Whatever the outcome of the replay against Sheffield United on February 7, Wrexham are already having one of their best FA Cup seasons. They went to more than four rounds only twice, in 1979-80 and 1980-81, and were eliminated first against Everton and then Wolverhampton in the round of 16. Not these, but their most famous cup run in 1991-92, when they beat the champion Arsenal at home 2-1 in the third round.
Despite never playing in the top division, Wrexham appeared several times in the since-defunct European Cup Winners’ Cup due to their performance in the Welsh Cup, not for nothing. In 1975/76, after defeating a Swedish and a Polish team, they lost only 2-1 on aggregate to the later winner, Anderlecht, famous in Europe at the time.
The victims of their current march in the FA Cup so far:
- Oldham Athletic (Fifth Division) 3-0 (Home)
- Farnborough FC (Sixth Division) 4-1 (Home)
- Coventry (second division) 4-3 (away) – this could be a warning to Sheffield United, who are also in the second division, Wrexham won’t surrender to the paper form even away, in the 58th minute they already led 4-1 against the middle team of the Championship.
Only the Premier League
And what could be the end of the fairy tale? The Premier League, of course. “Ten years from now, now and always, the Premier League is the plan,” Reynolds was quoted as saying Athletic. If the European competition systems – in contrast to the American ones – are not closed, and the Premier League is also open from the bottom, then why would they stop halfway? Reynolds’ goal is to make the stadium suitable for PL and international matches. The work is in full swing, this could also be seen in the TV coverage of the match against Sheffield United. “Call us crazy if you want,” said Reynolds, but no one in Wrexham and its environs, or perhaps the whole of North Wales, would do that anymore.
(Cover photo: Irish midfielder Thomas O’Connor celebrates his team’s second goal. Photo: Oli Scarff / AFP)
